I came across this article in The Age, an Australian web site and I thought, "how neat, an article about writing and motherhood!"
And it has some good comments, like ...
They wrote when they could, in fits and starts between chores, over the baby in the lap; and when they couldn't write on paper or the computer, they wrote in their heads. They sometimes found that chaos and urgency became important, even necessary, to their writing.
But there were a few comments that irritated me, like the one about some Mr. Hoity-Toit that thought you couldn't possibly be a mother AND an artist (read: "arteest") because you were supposed to give your soul to your art. Hogwash. No one tells doctors to hold off having kids so they can give their soul to their work. No one tells a teacher or a salesperson...
Personally, I feel as though motherhood has made me a better writer. (As someone else in the article also mentioned) I was always a writer, but I didn't think I had anything important to say until I was a mom.
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2 comments:
I totally agree with you. Someone needs to walk a mile in a artist/writer/mom's shoes before saying something like that. Love the blog. :)
Being a mother has changed my writing, but that said, I was a mother fairly young, but had been writing for close to 17 years before that (I started writing stories at four!).
I think that anyone that says it's easy being anything that you really invest yourself into is completely and utterly nuts. I find writing very easy, both motherhood is where I fall flat on my face. Being a writing mother is just hell - I can never get it to balance.
I also think Mr Hoit-Toit is wrong. You can give your soul to writing and your whole life to your kids - cause in a way, I write FOR my kids. For their future, and being able to afford to give them the best, and so, when they're old enough, they can see why their mother was always writing snippets and not reading them back - why their mother's freinds always demanded 'more' when she handed over those scraps of paper, and why she'd be still awake at six am, reading the big pile, before chucking it in the postbox, with them, and including them in the adventure.
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